Pandagon is daily opinion blog covering feminism, politics, and pop culture. Come for the politics, stay for the complete lack of patience for the B.S. and bad faith coming from conservative leaders and pundits.

I continue to be annoyed at the people who think this debate is about some well-meaning Christians who don’t want to hurt anyone but just don’t want to be party to what they supposedly think is baby-killing. To believe that, you have to ignore the possibility that a misogynist filled up on Jesus justifications would rather let someone die on his watch rather than let a sex-having woman get away without god’s holy punishments. The erratic nature of pharmacy refusals should tell us what’s going on—a lot of pharmacists are picking and choosing who gets pills, based on cues that they think believe indicate someone is a slut, from her clothes to her age to her lack of a wedding ring.

The late term abortion debates stand alone in my mind as the perfect example of how the media and public pretend not to see blatant misogyny. These are the abortions that anti-choicers are most eager to ban, but these are also the abortions that are most necessary to keep women from suffering or dying needlessly. The need to have the law step in and tie doctors’ hands so that they can’t prevent crippling or killing women that committed the crime of being female screams to me nothing short of base misogyny. The Kos blogger linked a really good site to clarify who the preferred victims of anti-choice law-making are. Here’s an example of someone who is supposed to just suffer and die rather than get help:

To make a long and unbearable story short, they discovered that I was in complete renal failure and most of my organs were shutting down (kidney, pancreas, liver.)….

As we reached the 25-week mark for Thomas, he was measuring only 20 weeks. It seemed that he had stopped growing and developing and there was almost no more amniotic fluid left around him. They couldn’t even do another amniocentesis safely because there wasn’t enough fluid. They told us that he would probably not make it to full term and even if I could carry him that long he would not survive once born. Mind you, my health was not very good since I was still recovering from the renal failure, (and very slowly, I might add.) I was told after the fact that they didn’t think I would survive, never mind Thomas. We had to make a decision about what to do, end the pregnancy now or wait and take a chance of me relapsing before we made it to the nine – month mark. Either way, I was told my baby would not survive.

There’s not really a baby to “save” by killing the mother in these cases, but I suppose no matter. If she didn’t want to suffer like this, she shouldn’t have been born a woman.

About the Author

Amanda Marcotte is a freelance journalist born and bred in Texas, but now living in the writer reserve of Brooklyn. She focuses on feminism, national politics, and pop culture, with the order shifting depending on her mood and the state of the nation.